To get phone calls to your business, set up a call-only campaign to encourage customers to call you by clicking or tapping your ad. With call-only campaigns, you bid to drive calls to your business instead of clicks to your website. You can set your ads to show only when your business can take calls, so you won’t miss an opportunity to connect with your customers.

How they work

Ads created in call-only campaigns are fine-tuned to show only on mobile devices that are capable of making calls. Clicks on these ads will only generate calls — they won’t link to a website. These ads are very flexible with how they can appear. To optimise for mobile and enhance performance, your ads may not always show every line of text that you enter when setting up your campaign. Likewise, select extensions, which are available for call-only campaigns, may also be hidden in order to make the most of the smaller screen space on mobile devices.

Extensions expand your ad with additional information and can give your ad greater visibility and prominence on the search results page. There’s no cost to add them, and it is recommended that you add all extensions that are relevant to your business. Clicks on your ad (including your extension) will be charged as usual. 

Here are some key points to know about using call-only campaigns:

• You can share your phone numbers across ads within an ad group or entire campaign
• You can set numbers to show only when your business can take calls
• You can count calls as conversions. Learn more about call conversions and about call reporting.
• Clicks on your number cost the same as headline clicks (a standard CPC)
• Call-only campaigns are not yet available for campaigns targeting the Display Network
• When you create a new ad in your call-only campaign, you’ll be asked to enter a phone number for your business. In order to verify your ad and number, Google will ask for a verification URL, which should lead to a page that displays your phone number. 

Bidding and reporting

Because call-only campaigns only allow clicks-to-call, you’re able to bid for calls to your business instead of clicks to your website. This means that your cost per click bid should match the value that you would place on a phone call from your ad. The default bid strategy is maximise clicks, or in this case, calls. If you’ve set up conversion tracking for calls, you can use maximise conversions, or Target CPA bidding.

Calls from your ads will appear under the ‘Clicks’ column in your reporting table for each call-only campaign.

If your primary business goal is to get phone calls to your business, create call-only campaigns. Call-only campaigns allow you to focus on getting more calls straight from your ads. With these campaigns, you can use CPC bidding based on the value of a call to your business. You can also add your existing phone information to your new ads and attach select extensions to your call-only campaigns.

Before you begin

To show phone numbers with your ads, add a verification URL when creating your ads. This URL should link to a landing page where Google can confirm the phone number that you’d like to show on your ads. The phone number on your landing page must match the number that you show in your ads.